It would be asking too much to look for coherence in Nazi policy in these weeks, even in the area of killing the defenceless, in which the regime excelled. In any case, the speed of the Soviet advance in the east, where some of the largest camps were situated, meant that decisions were usually taken ‘on the ground’, in maximum haste and often chaotically, by the local SS leadership, and frequently lacked any clarity of goal other than to evacuate the camp forthwith and prevent the enemy taking the prisoners alive.92 Mass killing of huge numbers of prisoners at the last minute, as guards were taken by surprise by the rapidity of the Soviet advance, was impractical. Leaving them alive for the enemy to find was explicitly ruled out (though in practice this sometimes happened with those too weak to transport away). That left forcing them, weakened and emaciated by their capitivity, ill-clothed and with scarcely any food, to be moved westwards, often on foot since insufficient transport was available, through the ice, snow and glacial winds of midwinter. The result was predictably murderous, but the horror was more usually a matter of improvisation within the remit of general guidelines rather than following clearly prescribed orders from above. For the guards, in any case, the haste of the marches, and the shooting or clubbing to death of stragglers and others who could not keep up the pace, was less dictated by the worry that the prisoners would fall into enemy hands than the fear of being taken captive themselves.93
The chaos of the actual evacuations of camps and prisons did not mean that no plans had been laid for the removal of the incarcerated when the enemy arrived. The judicial authorities in Berlin had, in fact, already in late 1944 devised guidelines for evacuating the inmates of penal institutions, which were passed on in early 1945 to areas close to the front lines. Prisoners were divided according to the severity of the offence and racial criteria. Remaining Jews and ‘half-Jews’, Sinti and Roma, Poles, and the most serious categories of habitual criminals, psychopaths and ‘asocial subversive prisoners’ were on no account to be freed or allowed to fall into enemy hands. If they could not be transferred to the police and removed, they had to ‘be neutralized by shooting them dead’ and the evidence ‘carefully cleared up’.94 The Soviet advance was so fast, however, that the 35,000 or so prisoners in seventy-five jails and penitentiaries in the path of the Red Army could not be transported back to central Germany in any orderly fashion.
Forced marches of prisoners who were in no physical condition to endure the treks of more than 30 kilometres a day on icy roads and tracks with hardly any food and without warm clothing or adequate footwear were chaotically undertaken. Many simply dropped by the wayside, exhausted, frozen and starving. Others were shot by trigger-happy guards, themselves desperate to flee from the oncoming Soviets. In one march of women prisoners, forced to cover 36 kilometres in a day in a temperature of minus 12 degrees Celsius, only 40 out of 565 arrived at their destination. But on some marches, a third of the prisoners managed to escape. Their guards were often too few in number and more concerned to save their own skins than to bother about the prisoners. Some guards just left their charges and fled into the unknown. Even so, the death rate during the prison evacuations was high, while several thousand prisoners were simply shot dead in their penitentiaries in the last months of the war to add to those who died on the forced marches.95
For the inmates of the concentration camps, the death toll on the forced marches was far higher still. By 27 January, when the Red Army reached Auschwitz, by far the biggest concentration camp (which, with its nearby satellites, had combined a huge slave-labour complex with an immense extermination capacity), only about 7,000 of the weakest prisoners—barely more than living skeletons—remained of a camp population that had once comprised as many as 140,000 terrorized individuals, the bulk of them Jews. Gassing operations had been halted in November 1944. About 1.1 million victims, around a million of them Jews, had perished there.96 Killing installations had been dismantled, and attempts made to erase the traces of the camp’s murderous activities.97 The unexpected swifness of the Soviet advance had caused panic among the Auschwitz guards, though reasonably clear guidelines had been laid down for the clearance of the camp. These included orders from the camp commandant, SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer, to shoot stragglers on the march or any prisoner trying to flee.98
Beginning already on 17 January some 56,000 prisoners, resembling ‘columns of corpses’,99 had marched off, in great fear and abject misery, scantily clad and without food, trudging through heavy snow in piercing cold. Some were forced to push wheelbarrows carrying the guards’ belongings. Another 2,200 were transported by train six days later in open coal wagons with no protection from the glacial conditions. The guards scarcely knew where they were going, apart from the targeted destination of the camp of Groß-Rosen, some 250 kilometres to the west. Minimal food supplies were requisitioned in the villages the prisoner columns passed through. What rest the prisoners were allowed had often to be spent in the open; even barns or schoolrooms could sometimes not be used for overnight stays since they were already full of refugees. ‘Any of the prisoners who could not go further was shot,’ recalled just over a year later one member of a column of about 3,000, mainly Jews, who left Auschwitz-Birkenau on foot in freezing conditions on 18 January. ‘It was a complete shooting-festival.’100
‘Every hundred metres there’s an SS milestone’—the SS’s own term for another corpse they had left in the gutter by the roadside with a bullet in the head—recalled another survivor, who endured sixteen days of the barely imaginable horror before arriving at Groß-Rosen. On the first awful night of the march, he had been forced to stand with the other prisoners for eight hours overnight in the freezing cold of a factory yard belonging to one of Auschwitz’s subsidiary camps, without food or drink, not even permitted to move to relieve himself. By the time they moved on next morning, seventy prisoners were dead. The column tramped on as if in a trance, prisoners eating snow to quench a raging thirst. Whenever there was a fragment of food to be had, prisoners in near delirium fought each other for it, to the amusement of their guards.101 On one day, 23 January, after marching for nine hours through the fierce cold, the prisoners caught a glimpse of a signpost telling them that they were 2 kilometres farther from Gleiwitz than when they had started that morning. Little wonder that some thought the torture had no point, other than marching on until they were all dead. Some yearned for death to end their misery, and the SS were glad to oblige. For others, survival was all that counted.102 For many, there was no survival. Up to 15,000 Auschwitz prisoners, most of them Jews, died on the marches.103
For those who reached Groß-Rosen, the agony of the marches was far from over. Initially a small camp, Groß-Rosen, at an important rail junction in Silesia 60 kilometres south-west of Breslau, had swollen to become a huge complex comprising numerous subsidiary camps, and held 80,000 prisoners. As camps and prisons in the General Government of Poland had been closed down over previous months and new prisoners had arrived on almost a daily basis—many of them swiftly to be pushed out again—Groß-Rosen’s overcrowding reached monstrous proportions, with some of the barrack-huts forced to house up to nine times their normal complement. Hygiene and sanitation were as good as non-existent, illness and infestation rampant. Rations consisted of bread and a spoonful of jam, with half a litre of salty soup distributed three times a week. ‘We are a thousand men lying in a room with space for maximum two hundred,’ jotted one prisoner in his diary notes. ‘We can’t wash, we get half a litre of swede-broth and 200 grams of bread. Up to today there are 250 dead in our barracks alone.’104 And as conditions deteriorated, the terror inflicted by the guards became even more arbitrary.